2. Materials and Methods

2.1. Montivipera occurrence points

In the current research, we used the most complete dataset of MRC distribution across mountainous landscapes of Iran, eastern Turkey, and southern Armenia (Fig. 1). We collected the presence points (n = 91) throughout the entire range of the species based on direct field research, other herpetologists’ field studies, and literature review. All the presence points were assessed based on the IUCN range map and spatial outliers (especially those from the literature) were excluded. Moreover, to cope with the probable spatial autocorrelation of the occurrence points we removed repeated points within a buffer of 5-km radius which remained us 82 occurrence points. The coverage of all collected records indicates apparent signs of spatial bias toward the north and northwestern Iran, eastern Turkey, and Armenia, and sparse sampling across the Zagros Mountains in western Iran, where new localities were just recently recorded. Therefore, the occurrence points were split into training and testing data, using records from northern parts for training and keeping the newly identified presence data from southern parts as independent evaluation data.